ABSTRACT
There has been global concern with the extent of offshore stress and fatigue and its potential environmental cost is widely evident across the industry. Regulators, ship and installation owners, trade unions and protection and indemnity clubs are all alert to the fact that a combination of minimal manning, sequences of rapid turnarounds, adverse weather conditions and high levels of traffic may find offshore personnel working long hours and with insufficient recuperative rest. In these circumstances stress, fatigue and reduced performance may lead to environmental damage, ill-health and reduced life-span among highly skilled workers who are in increasingly short supply. A long history of research into working hours and conditions in manufacturing as well as road transport and civil aviation industries has no parallel in the offshore industry. There are huge potential consequences of stress and fatigue offshore both in terms of both operations (accidents, collision risk, and poorer performance, economic cost and environmental damage) and the individual worker (injury, poor health and well-being). Not only has there been relatively little research on this topic but what there has been has been largely focused on specific jobs (e.g. watch keeping), specific sectors and specific outcomes (e.g. accidents). This reflects general trends in stress and fatigue research where the emphasis has often been on specific groups of workers and on safety rather than quality of working life (a crucial part of current definitions of occupational health).
Recent research has addressed these areas by studying seafarers (e.g. Allen et al., 2007, 2008; Kingdom & Smith, 2011, 2012; Smith et al., 2006; Wadsworth et al., 2006, 2008) and installation workers (Gann et al., 1990; Parkes, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2004, 2010, 2012). One of the conclusions from the research on seafarers’ fatigue was that a combination of risk factors was involved. This view is consistent with results from large scale surveys of occupational stress (Smith et al., 2004). The results showed that a measure of exposure to combinations of workplace factors (the Negative Occupational Factors Score) was associated with a number of health and safety outcomes, many of which were consistent across different industry sectors. Some of the associations reflected levels of perceived stress at work whereas others did not involve stress mediation. Negative occupational factors combined with non-work factors (e.g. demographic characteristics) to increase the risk of stress and minor injuries at work. Dissection of the negative occupational factors score identified outcomes influenced by job demand-control-support, effort-reward imbalance and physical hazards/working hours. Some outcomes were associated with all of these dimensions, others by pairs of dimensions and some were specific to a particular dimension. Stress at work was associated with all dimensions but a combination of high demands/high effort had the major effect. Analyses of longitudinal data confirmed effects observed in the cross-sectional analyses and gave a better indication of causality. This approach has also been shown to be important in assessing specific problems in certain occupations and in clarifying the effects of drug use on safety at work. In addition, it has strong implications for the development of stress management standards which demonstrated linear effects between negative job characteristics (e.g. the physical environment; working hours; job demands; lack of control or support; and effort-reward imbalance). The aim of the present study was to use this combined effects approach with an offshore sample.
